


I guess you call it longing

by nasaplates



Category: EXO (Band), K-pop
Genre: Falling in love with a stranger, Fluff, Getting Together, Light Angst, M/M, Pining, painter au, this is mostly fluff with only angst if you SQUINT
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-05
Updated: 2019-10-05
Packaged: 2020-11-24 13:41:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20908577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nasaplates/pseuds/nasaplates
Summary: Yixing, a painter who takes his work to the park to try to get out of an artistic funk, sees a beautiful man and can't get him out of his head. It changes everything.





	I guess you call it longing

**Author's Note:**

> Give Yixing A Chance Fest Prompt #1119: One of them is a painter who can't get the other's face out of his mind, and ends up creating a whole series of paintings of that person for his new exhibition. Based on Portrait of You by Chen.
> 
> hope the prompter enjoys where I went with this <3

Yixing shifts his bag over his shoulder, careful not to rattle it too much. His art supplies are, generally speaking, very secure and they can handle a little knocking around, honestly. But they're his life, and he probably cares for them more than he cares for himself at this point.

His stomach rumbles to prove the point. _ Later, _ he thinks, _ when I've got something sketched, then I'll grab a hot dog. _

Yixing loves painting, loves art, loves the paint on the palette, mixing the colors, sketching the composition, finding the balance. It's like dancing, almost, color and light and the movement of his hands choreographing the perfect arrangement. There's a musicality to it, when he's inspired and flowing. But even when it's not like that, when it isn't flowing from his soul, he still loves it. The work is satisfying. And when he's finished and he can see the effects he's had with his creation, the way the emotions slide across a viewer's face? That makes all the stress and all the sleepless nights and all the hours with a hungry belly worth it.

It’s not always easy, though. He'll brave the pigeons in the park some days, just to avoid looking at the four walls of his studio, the unfinished paintings scattered around, the unfinished thoughts in the air. There's something about sunlight on living things that feels worth capturing on the page, even when nothing else does. And it's a way to get back to basics; the technicality of landscape, a familiar scene done with new technique.

Yixing finds a bench, one in a row of them, another row on the opposite side of the wide path. There are a handful of people around, sitting on the benches, walking by, a few dogs happy to run and sniff and say hello to the world. Yixing doesn’t mind, loves it honestly, all the life that gently pulls him out of his own head. They don’t block his view, anyway, his favorite camellia tree on the shore of the little pond still easily visible. The tree is just budding, the hints of red in the furled petals a promise of the riot of color to come.

Setting up his unobtrusive travel easel, he’s already got ideas flowing through his head. He mutters to himself softly, pulling out his small watercolor kit and brushes. A loose style, he thinks. The colors suit it, and the soft breeze and the scattered clouds on blue sky. It’s good practice for him, anyway. He always struggles so much with _ loose_.

When he’s done, pencil in hand, paints laid out for when he needs them, Yixing looks up and realizes a man has sat down on the bench directly across from him. The man is _ beautiful. _ Smiling eyes, short cropped brown hair blowing softly in the wind, something unusual and stunning in his jaw and the slope of his nose. He’s wearing beige slacks, brown shoes, one ankle resting neatly on the opposite knee, a loose white shirt, cream coat folded neatly on the seat beside him. He’s got a book in his hands, cradled so as to not crack the spine, and he’s smiling down at it like it’s telling him a private joke.

Suddenly, Yixing doesn’t want to paint the camellia tree anymore.

***

Yixing doesn't resist the urge to go to the park the next day. He tries to tell himself it's because it's a beautiful sunny day, the puffy blue clouds so tempting through his studio windows. Or that it's because he was so productive yesterday, pages and pages of loose sketches, flowing freely in a way his work hasn't for months.

But the truth is, those pages were filled with the same subject: the beautiful man, stunning of jaw, lovely of nose, private smile at a lovingly held book.

And maybe, just maybe, if he is very lucky, that man will be there again today, sitting on that same bench, dappled sunlight in his hair.

Heart in his throat, Yixing resolutely doesn't jog across the street, dances past the pigeons, smiles at a little girl with an ice cream cone.

When he gets to his favorite spot, with the pond and the camellia, there is no man on the bench. There is a bird, small and brightly colored, perched on the back where the man was sitting the day before. Yixing stops in his tracks. The bird sings sweetly as if to mock him.

It's hard not to turn right back around and head home. Suddenly, the sky doesn't seem so blue, the clouds so tempting. But that would be stupid, to be broken hearted over a man he didn't even know, had only painted for an hour, furtive glances always redirected to the tree behind him if the man so much as blinked his way. And besides, he was a worker, above all else. Yixing set up slowly, methodically, without joy.

Charcoal stick lifted, hovering over the page, Yixing looks up and promptly drops the charcoal. The beautiful man is there, sitting on the opposite bench. Something bubbly kicks off, like champagne in his chest. The man pulls out a paperback book, a new one today, the cover a different color, and glances across the pavement at Yixing.

Face on fire, Yixing dives behind his easel like a shield, scrabbling for his lost charcoal stick. _ For fuck's sake, Zhang, you're not a teenager. Or a virgin! You've been to sex clubs, even! He's just a man. A very pretty man. A beautiful man with hair like fine spun burnished gold… _

Yixing shakes his head to clear it. When he looks up again, serious artist face firmly in place, the beautiful man is smiling down at his book, something more impish in it than his serene expression from yesterday. Heart filled with helium, Yixing touched charcoal to paper.

***

The pattern goes on for two weeks, in which Yixing shows up at the same time every day to the bench he’s started to think of as “his” and the beautiful man is either already there or arrives not long after. As time passes, Yixing notices some things about his unexpected muse.

He’s beautiful (shut up, it bears repeating). He doesn’t seem to have any specific purpose in the park; isn’t waiting for anyone else to arrive, never checks his phone, never seems to be in a hurry to arrive or to leave. The man just sits down on the bench, rests his coat next to him, pulls out a book, and reads for some amount of time that only seems to make sense to him. More often than not, Yixing will come out of an artistic fugue state, pick his head up to make sure he’s got the slope of the eyebrow just right, only to find the man had left without him noticing.

Only once does Yixing catch him leave, looking up just as the man stands and arches his back in a stretch, revealing long, taught muscles where his shirt rides up. They make eye contact again, and Yixing marvels at the sparkle in his eyes, before the man smirks and Yixing remembers himself and flicks his gaze up and to the right, lifting his pencil to make it seem like he was checking a perspective on the tree. He feels the man’s eyes on him like a brand, but Yixing doesn’t look at him again until he’s already several meters down the path, steps wide and confident.

***

Baekhyun comes and visits him one evening, barging into his studio like the wind slammed the door open and brought Chinese takeout with it. He sets down the food and, singing something he no doubt heard on the radio on the way there, drapes himself over Yixing's back. Yixing anticipated the move, adjusted his brushstroke to accommodate him even before his arms jostle him and Baekhyun smacks a loud kiss to the side of his face.

"Hi honey, I brought life giving sustenance because you're too stupid to order it yourself!" Baekhyun sing songs, getting bored with holding Yixing and wandering around to look at the canvases.

"Oooh, he's hot!" Baekhyun crows, delightedly. Yixing sighs and rinses his brush in a waiting glass of water, rinses it again in a slightly cleaner glass of water, and sets it on a paint stained towel to dry.

The painting is of the man at the park, flower petals raining down around him like snow.

"Oh this will be _ perfect _ for your exhibition next month!" Baekhyun says, leaning down to look closer at the painting.

Yixing pauses in his effort to rub the tension out of his forehead.

"Exhibition?"

"Oh that's right, I didn't tell you yet," Baekhyun spins on a heel and smiles at Yixing. "I just talked to Junmyeon, he's got an unexpected opening at one of his galleries, so, naturally, I told him he'd be a fool not to have you exhibit for him, and, naturally, he agreed."

Yixing gets the feeling that’s not quite how Junmyeon would describe the conversation, but he lets it slide in the face of the fact he now has an entire exhibition to prepare, apparently.

_ "Hell," _ he mutters. "What is he looking for, exactly?" Yixing asks.

"Portraiture, you know how he is, very pretentious, The Eyes Are A Window To The Soul, blah blah. He loves you though so he'll show anything you've got," Baekhyun shrugs, and then rifles through the takeout bag until he comes up with an egg roll that he shoves into his mouth whole.

Yixing eats, mechanically, mindlessly, participates in whatever Baekhyun wants to talk about the same way, humming and nodding at what seem like appropriate moments. His mind is on his paintings, though, cataloguing them, making a plan for the gallery, coming up with new ideas, deciding which of his sketches he wants to develop and which he doesn't.

At some point Baekhyun stretches and yawns and then gives Yixing a long, hard look.

"If you don't sleep at some point tonight I'm going to put hot pink dye in your shampoo again," he says, and then smacks another loud kiss to the top of Yixing's head when Yixing rolls his eyes and nods in reply.

Yixing does sleep, on the tiny air mattress set up in the corner of the studio, covered in fine flecks of paint.

***

It rains the next day, a fine mist on the windows in the morning, a torrential downpour by the afternoon. Yixing doesn't have the energy to spare for disappointment at not being able to go to the park, he just keeps painting feverishly, the same man, over and over.

He tries to paint other people, other sketches and other photographs, friends and relatives and celebrities, but no matter what he does they all end up morphing into the man at the park, kind eyes, interesting jaw, beautiful smile. Even when Yixing abstracts the paintings, takes it out of portraiture and into hands, faceless forms, disembodied pieces of people, he still knows it's him, all him, everywhere around him on every canvas he has.

For weeks he paints, for weeks it rains.

The sun comes out again and still he paints, and still Yixing can't paint anything but him.

***

The day before the gallery opening, all the paintings are complete and carefully taken to the gallery to be hung. Yixing has nothing to do now, and there’s an odd heaviness and a lightness in his limbs, the anxiety of feeling as though he’s forgotten something, coupled with the certainty he’s done good work, and done all he could do. It’s how he always feels after a project, a bit lost, a bit accomplished.

The sun is shining again so he goes to the park, no materials this time, no bag. He dodges a flock of pigeons, too distracted to even be truly afraid of them. Yixing finds his bench, empty and waiting as always, and he just sits, tips his head back into the sun and closes his eyes.

After a while, someone sits next to him, the presence warm and unobtrusive. Yixing tips his head down slowly, opens his eyes to look at his benchmate, and finds he isn’t surprised to see his beautiful man next to him, looking back at him, smiling gently. They just watch each other for a moment, Yixing’s mind swirling soft and slow.

“No painting today?” the man asks, voice as gentle and genuine as his smile.

“No,” Yixing says, voice feeling like molasses as he speaks. “No painting.” He takes a deep breath, faces forward to look at the camellia tree, blooms full, petals starting to fall. “I just finished a collection for an exhibition opening tomorrow, and my friend locked me out of my studio and told me I had to take at least a day to relax.”

Yixing isn’t sure why he tells him this, but it feels like the words come out of him on a string. Minseok had come to help pack up paintings, cooing at the ones he liked, and then, when they were all done and Baekhyun had patted Yixing on the cheek and stolen his studio keys, Minseok told Yixing if he didn’t get at least an hour of sun he would personally drag him out by the ankles. Then he’d smiled, and patted Yixing’s cheek in an impish mimic of Baekhyun and walked away.

“It’s good, that you have people looking out for you like that,” the man says, sincerity clear in his voice, “you always look so tired.”

Yixing cringes and looks down at lap. Nice to know his _ it’s not a crush it isn’t it ISN’T _ thought he looked like shit most of the time. Seeming to sense his misstep and Yixing’s discomfort, the man flutters a hand out as though he was going to put it on Yixing’s shoulder and then pulls it back in.

“Oh, oh no, not like that,” he laughs and even that is gentle. “I just mean that you always work so hard, every day it seems like you’re here working away, so intensely focused all the time.” He tilts his head a bit, trying to catch Yixing’s eye and smiles when he does, eyes crinkling at the corners with his grin. “It’s nice to see you look so relaxed.”

They just look at each other, Yixing’s eyes darting around this beautiful, and, apparently, genuinely kind man’s face. He’s seen it so many times, watched his expression shift as he read a book or watched a dog playing or gave a hug to a little girl who’d dropped her ice cream in front of him. It shouldn’t be a surprise, anymore, how lovely he is, how nice to look at. But it is somehow. Even though it’s as familiar as his own reflection, Yixing is still surprised.

“I’m Kim Jongdae,” the man says, reaching out a hand to shake. Yixing just looks at it for an awkward second, stunned that this was actually real, that he’s truly a man with a name and everything. Eventually manners kick in and he takes his hand for a shake. His palm is dry and small in his.

“Zhang Yixing.”

Jongdae’s smile is as warm as the sun. “Nice to finally meet you, Zhang Yixing.”

Still holding Jongdae’s hand in his, revelling in the feeling of their palms pressed together, Yixing blurts out, “Will you come to my gallery opening?” He immediately kicks himself for it, absolutely ridiculous thing to ask a man when you just learned his name. He drops Jongdae’s hand only for Jongdae to beam at him, so bright it’s blinding.

“I would love that,” he says, and a bright pink camellia petal floats gently between them on the breeze.

It isn’t until later, after the daze of Jongdae’s smile has passed, after he’s given him the gallery information, time and place of the exhibition, after Jongdae has checked his watch and apologetically gone on his way, after Yixing sits in stunned and rapturous happiness, that he remembers.

Every single one of the paintings is of Jongdae.

“Fuck,” Yixing mutters. A passing mother glares at him and covers her sons ears. While he’s stammering apologies, a camellia petal flutters in a circuitous path through the air and lands, softly, in his hair.

***

The next night at the exhibition, Yixing is more nervous than he can remember being since he was a small child standing fast in the face of his parents’ questions as he told them he was going to dedicate his life to painting. They were wonderfully supportive in the end, and they always come to his gallery showings when they can, crossing oceans sometimes, no matter how many times he tells them not to burden themselves. They aren’t in the crowd tonight, the month notice too soon for any reasonable travel plans, but he’d already planned a visit to them next week, and he’ll be sure to have a photo album ready for them to coo over when he does.

He finds himself glad they aren’t there, possibly for the first time in his life, if only because he can’t stop fidgeting and wondering if Jongdae is really going to show up, if he’s going to take one look at this ridiculous _ shrine _ of an exhibit and turn around and run. Yixing wouldn’t blame him if he did, and the thought makes him grimace through a smile to one of the champagne wielding gallery donors, asking him a somewhat slurred question about his brush strokes.

Long minutes later, after extracting himself from a bubble of wealth that makes him wish he’d worn his red star pin in his suit lapel, Yixing takes a breath only to have it stolen from his lungs.

Jongdae looks stunning, in a black suit and white shirt, comfortably open at the collar, black shoes polished and gleaming, his chestnut hair shining in the gallery lighting. His face is softly glowing, a wide-eyed look of admiration on his features. It’s precisely the expression Yixing loves best, when people look at his work; like they’re seeing something that will stay with them for longer than just the minute they look at the work.

The painting he’s looking at is clearly of himself in side profile, gentle smile on his face, eyelashes fanned over his cheek, a crown of yellow and pink daisies in his hair. He looks like a benevolent fae god, come to smile down upon the earth.

On numb feet, steps as smooth as he can make them, Yixing walks over to Jongdae, comes up next to him, shoulder to shoulder. Yixing clears his throat but Jongdae doesn’t turn, just keeps smiling at the painting.

“It’s beautiful,” he murmurs.

“I’m sorry,” Yixing says almost against his will. “I should have warned you, yesterday, that you were, well.” He aggressive rubs his right thumb over his own left hand, a tic he picked up in order to not mess up his hair at functions like these when all he really wants to do is tug it out of it’s carefully prepared place. “This is probably some kind of breach of privacy, I never asked if this was alright, and I’m sorry. You’re just. You’re so.”

Jongdae just looks at him patiently, waiting for him to finish his thought, not giving him an out. Yixing swallows, tries again.

“You’re so beautiful. I couldn’t get you out of my head.” Plain truth, stated simply.

Jongdae smirks, glances around. “I can see that.”

“Oh god,” Yixing says, suddenly mortified, and puts his face in his hands.

Jongdae makes a soft sound and reaches out with gentle hands to pull Yixing’s away from his face. He’s smiling, still, that same genuine and ridiculously gentle smile.

“I couldn’t get you out of my head, either,” Jongdae says, and Yixing feels like a bubble is expanding in his chest. Jongdae keeps holding Yixing’s hands in his and looks around at all the people admiring the paintings, some of them looking at him and Yixing, most of them too focused on the work.

“I can’t paint to save my life,” Jongdae continues, “But if I could, I’d probably have been just a little bit preoccupied with your hands, too.”

It punches a chuckle out of Yixing’s chest, which Jongdae mirrors, and even his laugh feels more real than all the other people in the room. They stand there for an embarrassingly long time, just grinning at each other. Yixing twists their hands so it’s a mutual hold, fingers woven together loosely, soft skin against Yixing’s hands, lightly chapped with how much he washes and cleans his brushes. He feels exposed, like this, in front of so many people, unmistakably intimate hold on another man’s hands, but Jongdae’s eyes look back at him, knowing and kind, and he feels safe, and warm, and good.

“Can I take you out to dinner?” Jongdae asks, like it was an easy question, like he knows the answer and he’s asking out of true desire to hear Yixing say it. Yixing’s never been asked out like this before, like ‘Yes’ would be a gem Jongdae would like to tuck away into a soft corner of his heart.

“Yes,” Yixing says, and it’s easy. “Yeah, I would like that.”

Later, they will go out to a nearby noodle shop, and Yixing will spend most of the night making Jongdae laugh, when Jongdae isn’t doing his best to make him smile. Even later than that, Yixing will take two trains and a bus to visit his parents, and they will coo just like he knew they would at his work, and ask questions about the kind faced boy in his pictures, and he will tell them he is a friend without feeling like he’s lying because he didn’t mention that his arms around him in his bed in the morning are kind, too.

But for now, Yixing makes the rounds with the donors, smile genuine this time, heart full of possibilities, eyes full of warmth.

**Author's Note:**

> comments are life, if you enjoyed this please let me know <3


End file.
